 "Europe may panic but Trump’s return suits India, and Elon-Vivek’s DOGE agenda suits New Delhi even more")
Donald Trump’s second term has raised the collective blood pressure in Europe. From stiff upper-lipped Britons to the inscrutable Germans, the Republican candidate’s win has set the cat among the pigeons. The EU is holding its breath. Ukraine is in limbo. Russia is threatening to nuke the continent. America’s treaty allies and partners in Asia and elsewhere are also scared of the volatility and instability ahead. India, in contrast, appears more comfortable.
It is not that New Delhi does not expect turmoil. It hopes to manage the situation better. As external affairs minister S Jaishankar said recently, “I know many countries are nervous about the US today, but let’s be honest. We are not one of them…” This cautious optimism arises chiefly from the equation that prime minister Narendra Modi shares with Trump. With Modi, this is as much a personal relationship as statecraft.
As Jaishankar pointed out during an interaction in Mumbai earlier this month, “When he (PM Modi) first visited Washington D.C., Barack Obama was the president, then it was Donald Trump, and then it was Joe Biden… There is something natural in terms of how he forges those relationships…”
With Trump, more so than others, the old Washington adage of ‘personnel is policy’ rings truer than ever. Ever the consummate politician, Modi has instinctively grasped the reality. He would have assessed in Trump’s first term itself that the chief risk associated with the former president and now president-elect is his unpredictability. Managing this unpredictability, that could be greater in the second iteration, will be the key challenge and New Delhi reckons that it is in a much better position to do so than many other countries, especially those in Europe.
Part of the reason Europe finds itself in this pickle, suffering from panic attacks at Trump’s return to the Oval Office is that it had taken for granted America’s ideological overcommitment towards its security architecture – an obligation that Trump cares little about and sees as exploitative.
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More ShortsHe has a point. Europe has grown so used to free-riding on US security guarantee via NATO that Trump’s clear-eyed assessment of the relationship and demand for better defence spending has sent the bloc leaders into deep depression.
French president Emmanuel Macron has taken a leaf out of India’s book. His calls for Europe’s “strategic autonomy” and enhancing defence capabilities instead of becoming “America’s followers”, however, has been met with indifference from central and eastern European states who see themselves in all practical purposes as American protectorates.
Their reluctance and insecurity are rooted in the deep scepticism over the continent’s future without the US acting as the unifier and the benevolent hegemon. In her essay for Foreign Policy, Anchal Vohra writes that while most central and eastern European nations “welcome the EU enhancing its military capacities… They have strong doubts over how France and Germany would have acted after Russian tanks neared Kyiv, had the US not unequivocally pushed back against Russian president Vladimir Putin. Some of them suspect that France and Germany would have sat and let Putin take more Ukrainian territory, just as they had in 2014 after the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea.”
Some scholars, however, argue that the pathway for a stronger Europe lies in America’s burden shifting, and that the pearl clutching in Brussels at the very thought of Trump’s return is lazy escapism and evading of responsibility.
Sumantra Maitra, elected associate fellow at the UK’s Royal Historical Society, argues in Foreign Affairs magazine that the answer for Europe’s predicament is not ‘no NATO’ but a ‘dormant NATO’ where the US acts as an “offshore balancer”.
Maitra writes, “A dormant NATO” … “keeps the US tied to the continent, checks nuclear proliferation, and keeps nationalistic and imperialistic urges down among European powers. It restrains populism on both sides of the Atlantic with more equitable defence spending and provides security to European states that cannot, for historical reasons, trust their fellow European powers… The simple fact is that France, Germany, and other western European states will never seriously invest in their militaries until they can no longer free ride off the US for protection. They need Washington to partially pull back before they will better coordinate with central and eastern Europe.”
As of now, however, this is an academic debate for a Europe that is also worried that Trump will stop aiding Ukraine and force it to settle for a negotiation that involves permanent ceding of territory to Russia, and they are nervous about an impending trade war with Trump threatening to slap steep tariffs on all imports to the US to bring manufacturing jobs back home.
It is also possible that Europe gets stuck in the crossfire between a US-China trade war and becomes inundated with cheap Chinese goods rerouted from the US market. Evidently, the problems facing Europe are structural that may get deepened by Trump’s ‘America First’ policies unlike India which hopes for a strategic convergence with a second Trump administration in important areas such as outlook on China, Pakistan and radical Islamism. India might also be looking forward to the fact that a Trump administration will be a lot less preachy and sanctimonious than the Democrats and won’t attempt to execute regime change operations in India’s backyard.
What makes New Delhi almost an outlier in its silent confidence about handling Trump – so much so that the dominant discourse on the trajectory of India-US relationship post November 7 is around a ‘reset’ in ties that have become increasingly strained in recent times – is its inherent understanding that with Trump, personal is political. This point is easily misinterpreted.
Trump is not an irrational actor, unlike his image portrayed in the liberal media. He, however, cuts through the laid down processes and has little patience for strategic altruism unless he perceives space for little or big ‘wins’ and a route for cutting ‘deals’. While this may pose some challenges for foreign policy, it also presents opportunities. The bond between Modi and Trump also rests on the fact that both give a lot of stress on interpersonal connection as the basis for a more personalized and tailored foreign policy.
Modi was among the first three world leaders to telephone Trump to applaud him on his victory, and in a post on X (formerly Twitter), Modi said he had congratulated the president-elect and is “looking forward to working closely together once again to further strengthen India-US relations across technology, defence, energy, space and several other sectors.”
Trump, in return, reportedly said the “whole world loves Modi” and described India as a magnificent country and the prime minister as a “magnificent man.” Earlier during his campaign trail, Trump had said he considers Modi as “one of the nicest people” he has met and a “true friend” and praised the prime minister’s leadership skills. Trump has in the past expressed open admiration for Modi’s crowd-pulling power and claimed that he shares a “very good relationship” with him.
Beneath the niceties, however, both see each other for what they are: fierce nationalists who can let transactionalism shed its pejorative connotation and look out for profitable give-and-take minus the tiring pretentions.
Trump’s win has seen a surfeit of empty rhetoric from liberal media. Commentators claim that the basis of a better India-US relationship under Trump could be the Republican’s penchant for a “transactional foreign policy.”
To quote just one example, Chietigj Bajpaee of Chatham House, a UK-based think tank, writes in The Diplomat, “Trump’s proclivity to see foreign policy in purely transactional terms will weaken the narrative of a shared ideological affinity between the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy.”
To pretend that American foreign policy under any dispensation, Democratic or Republican, or any president, has been based on anything other than American self-interest, is a load of baloney.
The American self-image of exceptionalism and ‘unique virtuosity’ is based on the post-Cold War unipolar moment that its strategic elite has perpetually bought into, even though the US at different times in history has gone to bed with the nastiest of autocrats and launched wars on the flimsiest of pretexts, even plain lies.
The myth of America’s ‘value-based’ foreign policy is a blatant hypocrisy that seeks to hide its questionable dealings beneath the veneer of morality. As professor Stephen Walt writes in Foreign Policy, “this unchallenged faith in American exceptionalism makes it harder for Americans to understand why others are less enthusiastic about US dominance, often alarmed by US policies, and frequently irritated by what they see as US hypocrisy, whether the subject is possession of nuclear weapons, conformity with international law, or America’s tendency to condemn the conduct of others while ignoring its own failings.”
Elite America’s problem with Trump stems precisely from the fact that the US president-elect thinks little of America’s self-congratulatory image and takes a more unflattering approach in policymaking, or in dealmaking – in trying to achieve difficult trade-offs. His approach is more of a trader than a politician. This is exactly where India hopes to meet Trump.
New Delhi also perhaps believes that if Trump can be dealt with there will be significantly less friction or irritants in bilateral ties because unlike the Biden administration where invisible strings were being pulled from different directions, it’ll be different and more direct with Trump. He is his own NSA and secretary of state. Whether it’s national security adviser Mike Waltz or the likely secretary of state Marco Rubio – they are expected to play only a supporting role.
There is some merit in the argument, however, that the US system is a lot less centralized than other democracies such as India – not to speak of one-party authoritarian systems such as China – and hence try as he might to bend the system to his will (backed by a thumping mandate – a trifecta of presidency and both chambers of Congress) Trump’s agenda will still run into political gridlock or implementation problems faced with a stiff resistance from entrenched vested interests.
It is party due to this that Trump has entrusted Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with the task of cutting down the perma-bureaucracy and the administrative state to size – the immutable, immovable behind-the-scenes force that decides the gap between a president and his policymaking efficacy.
Writing in Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy observes that “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long,” going on to add that in implementing the agenda of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – cutting to size the “unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections” they expect ferocious “onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington.”
In declaring war against the Deep State, the powerful central state that de facto runs the country and its foreign policy, Trump has already triggered a fightback, with ensconced and vested interests promising to fight “tooth and nail” against his agenda. A report in The Telegraph quotes Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) in the US, as saying that he and his “colleagues were getting ready ‘for a really, really big fight’ when asked about Musk and Ramaswamy’s plans. The federal government employs almost three million people, many of whom work in Washington DC.”
Given India’s own troubles with this shadowy, all-pervading Deep State that dictates the major tenets of America’s foreign policy, India can only hope that Trump succeeds and the groundwork is set for an administration run by a democratically elected president and his political appointees. This would suit India and boost bilateral ties.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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